Peter Howell: ‘Oscar Wars’: Academy Awards have always been a battlefield; Michael Schulman divulges the details

Take a close look at a photo of an Oscar — or a real one, if you’re a winner of this prized golden statue.

See the sword the shiny naked man is holding? It’s to protect his modesty, sure, but the sword is modelled after the ones carried by the Crusaders, the knights in the holy wars of the Middle Ages. Oscar is packing a weapon.

If this sounds absurd, take a read of Michael Schulman’s new book, “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears.” Schulman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, makes the persuasive case that the Academy Awards have been fighting battles and smiting foes of one kind or another since even before their 1929 inception.

As we prepare to watch the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday while arguing about the nominees — Best Actress is a war unto itself — and wondering who might get snubbed (or slapped), it’s easy to lament the lost “good ol’ days.” You know, the time long ago when Hollywood stars, directors and producers gathered in joyful communion to salute the best of the previous year’s films.

Reality check from Schulman: the Oscars have never been that virtuous. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was created in 1927 at the behest of movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, as a defensive move to head off what he feared the most: rapacious unions and censorious governments.

The stated aim of the nascent organization, which elected as its first president swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr., the husband of Toronto-born actor Mary Pickford, was to “take aggressive action in meeting outside attacks that are unjust” while also promoting the “dignity and honour of the profession.”

The idea of hosting an awards ceremony was initially almost an after-thought, but it appealed to the cynical Mayer as a means of moderating the wage demands of actors: “I found that the best way to handle (artists) was to hang medals all over them.”

The first Academy Awards occurred on May 16, 1929, in a banquet room at L.A.’s Roosevelt Hotel with 270 people attending. There were hard feelings and dubious decisions even then. Nominated actors Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson failed to show; they had other things to do that night. The first Best Picture prize went to silent airborne romance “Wings” rather than to “The Jazz Singer,” an Al Jolson musical making history as the first feature-length “talkie,” presaging the end of the silent-film era.

“The Oscars, it should be said at the start, are always getting it wrong,” Schulman observes in his introduction. His nearly 600-page book is packed with examples of academy missteps and embarrassments, the latter including an entire chapter devoted to the “worst Oscars ever,” the 1989 event that opened with a chirpy Snow White and a tone-deaf Rob Lowe leading a cringeworthy song-and-dance salute to old Hollywood.

Another chapter delves into the bitter rivalry at the 1999 Oscars show between Steven Spielberg’s perceived Best Picture front-runner “Saving Private Ryan” and the Harvey Weinstein-produced upstart “Shakespeare in Love.” It resulted in yet another dismal result for Spielberg, whose many Oscar disappointments — likely to continue with this year’s “The Fabelmans” — play like a tragicomic joke throughout the book.

Still another chapter recounts the second most shocking Oscars dust-up, the first of course being last year’s on-camera slap of comedian Chris Rock by agitated actor Will Smith: the 2017 missing envelope debacle when the mostly white musical “La La Land” was initially announced as Best Picture instead of the real winner, the mostly Black drama “Moonlight.”

There are also accounts of academy hand-wringing over the desire to get younger, more female and more diverse voters (the #OscarsSoWhite debate looms large), pressing issues that have been seriously addressed in recent years by an expansion of voting ranks.

But “Oscar Wars” isn’t written as a compendium of the many times when Oscar failed to cover his naked butt. Other notorious incidents are barely mentioned, among them the 1973 snubbing of Marlon Brando’s Best Actor statue by Indigenous rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather and the 1974 “streaking” by naked nobody Robert Opel past hilariously unruffled actor David Niven.

What Schulman instead seeks to do, and largely succeeds, is to place all this tumult and insanity into historical and cultural context. He demonstrates how, from their very inception, the Oscars have been a game of nominees pretending to be humble and peaceful in public while backstage their handlers are engaged in no-holds-barred tussles to advance their candidates.

Sometimes these wars become public. Witness this year’s furious debate over the surprise Best Actress nomination for Andrea Riseborough, star of the little-seen indie gem “To Leslie.” Riseborough has sought to remain above the fray while aggrieved backers of overlooked actors Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) loudly cry foul on grounds of racism and privilege.

The book may shock and/or amuse casual Oscar watchers, even if much of it hardly qualifies as news to anyone who closely follows the industry.

Tantalizing hints of potentially huge scandals are frustratingly offered without much discussion. The 1969 and 1970 Academy Awards seem to have been particularly rife with questionable conduct swept under the red carpet.

Did the rare tie in 1969 for a Best Actress win between Katharine Hepburn (“The Lion in Winter”) and Barbra Streisand (“Funny Girl”) occur because rules were bent to make Streisand an academy voter before she was officially qualified to be one? (Streisand presumably voted for herself.)

Did anybody investigate Brenda Vaccaro’s claim that “three men in suits” (today they’d be called “Oscar strategists”) took her to lunch in 1970, guaranteeing her, for a fee of $3,000, a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in “Midnight Cowboy,” the eventual Best Picture winner? Vaccaro turned them down and didn’t get the nod. “I should have just given them the three grand,” she later mused.

One thing Schulman makes clear in “Oscar Wars” is that there’s zero logic to declaring something or somebody “best” in subjective discussions of art, yet human nature drives us to do so anyway: “We like watching people win or lose, and if given the chance, we want to win.”

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